Was the historical Jesus an anarchist?^137the early Roman empire as one of political capitalism,^113 in the
Weberian sense, an economy that consisted of “the exploitation
of the opportunities for profit arising from the exercise of politi-
cal power”;^114 it may have been a market economy of sorts^115 but
profit-making was in the hands of the political elite within the em-
pire and its retainers. Secondly, whilst there was little analogous to
the modern state in antiquity, the Roman government did monop-
olise ultimate military, fiscal, legislative and judicial power within
the regions it ruled (even if also allowed considerable autonomy).
Although the Roman empire of the first century CE was relatively
light on administrative functionaries^116 and military personnel,^117
given the extent of territory controlled,^118 it certainly meets a min-
imal definition of a state where a state is understood as a social
organization “capable of exerting a considerable degree of power
[...] over large numbers of people, and for sustained periods”.^119
Indeed, the Rome empire fulfilled the classic definition of the state
as that which “lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical
violence within a territory”.^120
We also need to address the related problem of ethnocentrism.
If we call Jesus an “anarchist” are we employing a term that
has no interpretative value outside of the modern European or
North American context within which anarchism first emerged
as a self-conscious movement, employing a concept that impedes
rather than assists our understanding of a figure from a differ-
ent cultural and historical context?^121 One that might be said to
carry with it the superior presumptions of Western modernity (or,
indeed, post-modernity) within which anarchism was born and
thrives? Not only would such a judgment be wrong because an-
archism itself has a long history of formal existence outside of
Europe or North America (one thinks, for example, of the histo-
ry of formal anarchist movements in Africa,^122 China,^123 Korea,
Japan^124 and elsewhere),^125 but also because, as we have noted, it
has been used by those engaged in the description and interpreta-
tion of non-European cultures, famously by Evans-Pritchard but
also by other anthropologists acutely aware of such criticisms.^126
Harold Barclay has made perhaps the most thoroughgoing de-
fence of the use of the term cross-culturally. He recognises that it
the use of the term “anarchy” might be viewed as: